Week One - First Thoughts & Drawing

After launching the drawing project using power points and group dicussions to get things started, we initially looked into creating experimental responses to single words on small A5 pieces of paper. The words we were given were;

• hard

• soft

• manmade

• organic

• gigantic

• minute

• organised

• random

• positive

• negative

• loud

• quiet

Upon reflection, it was interesting to note how noticing that the words were opposites influenced my decision on what to produce and experiment with, and how by noticing the qualities in a drawing under the title of "loud" for example, made me subconsciously make those qualities the complete opposite in the matching drawing.

After taking into account factors such as materials, tools, background, surface, and texture, I began creating my own responses to each word. I eventually produced 12 diverse responses inspired by each emotive word.

I used materials such as watercolour, collaged paper and magazine pages, brightly coloured drawing inks, chalk and charcoal and a graphite stick to create a variety of experimental responses, my favourites of which being the responses to 'manmade' (top left) 'random' (bottom right) and 'gigantic' (middle top).

My initial thoughts to the word 'manmade' sparked ideas such as infrastructure and architecture creating harsh and bold geometrical shapes in my mind, however I was inspired by the curvature of the bicycle wheels pictured in the first image (on the left) that reflected how man has used the wheel through time as a working invention, perhaps such as was used in time long gone for wagons and horse and carts, or other highly industrious purposes. However on the page, the three wheels looked to harsh against the contrast of the white background so I decided to add some charcoal to lessen the strict outline of the wheel. The single line I drew gave the illusion of a thick white tyre around the outside of each wheel, and the more raged angular marks suggest dirt being flicked up off the wheels, creating a strong sense of direction and movement in the response. I also chose to dampen down further the harsh white colouring if the cartridge paper by smudging in some of the charcoal to the page - especially out from and around the wheels, showing the light and shadow.

With the 'gigantic' experiment, I wanted to choose a material that wasn't a physical mark maker as all of my other responses had been either pen or ink or paint or something similar. Therefore I chose to use paper to create a 3D model, built in a landscape orientation off of the paper. I chose magazine pages with photos of earth or natural biological looking backgrounds to scrunch up flatly and stick to the page, before adding contrasting geometric triangle prism shapes, representing mountains amongst a vast lush green landscape create by the smaller paper scrunches.

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